


i will labor by singing light

by orphan_account



Category: Tron - All Media Types, Tron: Uprising
Genre: LGBT characters, Post-Canon, Post-Season/Series 01, Post-Season/Series 01 AU, Revolution
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-07 05:04:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18613720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: CLU begins his occupation in earnest.Beck fights a resistance.Tron lives.





	1. part one

**Author's Note:**

> oh, the hyperfixation's kicking my ass.  
> anyway - thanks, jay
> 
> muse(ic) is ransom by son lux  
> enjoy, and i love you!  
> \- p
> 
> obligatory warning label: references to canon violence, non-canon violence (no gore or exaggerated descriptions)  
> timeline notes: this takes place right where season 1 of uprising left off. i'm sticking to the canon of uprising, but this won't fit within the larger timeline of legacy or even evolution, although i'll pull references from those two every now and again

 

_ part one _

  
  


"Everyone into the garage," Beck says quietly, mask rezzing to distort his voice, "Everyone inside now."

Tron watches the back of his apprentice, his friend - his biolights reflect the wave of orange coming from over the Sea, the stormfront heralded by the massive yellow recognizer bearing down on the northern shore of Argon. Even from within the cradle of the city, they can see them, the lightjets and lightfighters, recognizers, rectifiers. An oppressive wall of red light trembling through the grid itself. He can feel his very code vibrating in tune with the fleet.

Tron's a security program - he's  _ the  _ security program. He knows the word for what this is.

Beck turns to him, two flat planes of tinted glass meeting each other as they share a look that doesn't need eye contact to land, that doesn't need anything but context and the shared urgency in their postures. 

"Help me get everyone in."

Mara, behind them both, is the first to send up the signal to the rest of the group. She's fought personal wars on the grid, many of them - this isn't much different. The crush of crisis is balanced on her shoulders, and she knows what to do with it. She turns back to the other handful of mechanics.

"Alright," her voice is too loud in the silence, only cut by the steady rumble of the oncoming fleet - an implacable noise, one that rattles through each of them in turn. "We'll fortify the garage - we know this place better than anyone on the grid. Everyone in, and then we'll seal the hangars. Keep together."

Zed, next to her, still has his eyes on the horizon. Beck can see the wave of orange-red-yellow reflected in his eyes. 

"We're mechanics, Mara," he whispers, "what are we gonna do? Make a fort? Hold off an army?"

"If we have to," Mara says. She activates her repair shielding, the yellow faceplate not quite hiding her expression the way Tron and Beck's faceplates do.

"Our priority is to protect these two," she says to the rest of the group, "we'll figure out a way to get them safely out of the city after we get ourselves somewhere defensible."

"We're not leaving the city," Beck says, stepping forward and past Tron. He feels the security program put a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugs it off.

"We're  _ not."  _

"That's CLU in there, isn't it?" Mara asks, her biolights brittle bright with the fear she's not showing on her face. "He's coming for both of you. Let us help."

Beck takes a step closer to the assembled mechanics, their discs still clutched in their hands and humming a chorus of low-level power. The ruined recognizer behind him charges the air with ozone, thick waves of smoke, and smoldering pixels.

"What you did, standing up to Pavel, to his guards, that was admirable," Beck says, "and we owe you for your courage. But this is different. That - " he points out over the water, the encroaching reddish light, "is not occupation reinforcements or a city-wide curfew, that's not Tesler or his commanders."

"It's an army," Tron says. Beck looks over at him. His suit, black, is still lit with more lights than Beck can ever remember him having, all portal-white and intricate in a way that speaks of early grid designs, of architecture and code gigacycles older than himself. For the first time since Tron entered that reprogramming chamber on the recognizer, Beck realizes how close the security program had come to total blackout - how long those lights had been hidden, too weak and crippled by pain to spark back to life. They'll soon fade, just over energized circuits showing through his suit, but for a moment Tron looks  _ old, _ powerful.

Beck nods.

"We're not leaving the city." 

Zed takes Mara's arm, half-turning back toward their ragtag resistance. His lights are just as bright as everyone else's, an instinctual fear that rises in their core coding like the vibrations through the grid itself, singing. 

"We're the best mechanics this city has. If we can't make something out of this scrapyard, who can?"

Mara nods. The two of them divide the group into two - Mara's group immediately takes to the outer walls of the garage, beginning to close the outer hangar doors and opening their data compilers to lock them down. Zed's group moves further into the garage, snapping tethers from the ceiling and breaking open batons to salvage parts for defenses. 

"We can fortify this place for a thousand cycles, Beck, but it won't hold against  _ that,"  _ Tron says quietly as they begin to follow their sudden resistance into the garage.

"I know. But we can't leave them, and there's nowhere for us to run where Tesler won't find us," Beck says. 

Tron shakes his head. "Not quite the place I'd want to make a last stand," he says, gesturing to the main hangar door as it drops after them with a dull, grid-shaking thunk.

"It won't be a last stand," Beck says, putting a hand on Tron's arm. "Promise."

 

x

 

"So here's the plan," Zed says half an hour later, "we make a last stand."

"Absolutely not," Beck says, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. The Renegade wouldn't panic over the thought of the loss of these programs he barely knows, wouldn't feel a sharp stab of guttural fear that makes him want to pull Zed and Mara close and keep them out of the oncoming dogfight that's currently skimming Argon's shore. He can't be Beck right now.

Zed rolls his eyes. "Okay, sure, but if you'd  _ let me finish _ \- Pavel's going to report back that we're here, and CLU can obviously see his shiny new recognizer in a pile of scrap right outside our door. We're stuck here. At least, that's what we'll have the occupation think. Mara, what's below the garage?"

Mara crosses her legs from where she's sitting on one of the lightcycle lifts, tapping her arm bracers together absently. "The harbor -  _ oh!  _ The harbor!"

Zed points to her, "Exactly. There's an escape route built in to this place already, we just need a distraction so we can actually use it. I'm thinking we keep doing what we're doing; lock down the garage, make sure everything is as defendable as we can get it. Make it look like a stronghold. A few of us can retrofit one of the lightfighters into a submersible while the others do that, and when CLU comes knocking we'll drop into the water and escape."

"I can do that," Beck says, thinking of the boat he'd thrown together on the collapsing island, and then of how it had been barely held together with a single line of binary and a lot of fucking luck, and corrects himself - "I've sort of done it before."

Zed nods at him at the same time that Tron shakes his head. His arms are folded in a way Beck recognizes. He's frustrated. It's one of his few tells.

"Even if we can get something like that operational, there's still no where for us to go. You'll all be identified by Pavel to Tesler, and after that you'll be hunted by the occupation. There's not a safe house in Argon that can withstand a direct assault by CLU's forces. I've checked."

Beck crosses to an info station near one of the lifts and pulls up a schematic of Argon, highlighting the garage with a gesture. The harbor around them is an empty void - no lights, no roadways, no structures, just pure black that cuts through the western edge of the city and creates an inlet that drains out to the Sea. His fingers follow the contour of the shore, a pixel-perfect line moving southwest, until -

"There, we can take the sub as far as there," he says, and pulls the map over onto his disc, holding it flat in front of his chest for the rest to see.

"It's near the border - we can follow the Sea until there, move southeast on land until we reach your place," Beck tilts his chin up at Tron. 

The security program sighs. "If we can even get there without being stopped, or followed. Cyrus' virus did some damage to the internal operating system, too - if we went there, there'd be no guarantee that we'd know what was happening in the rest city, or even if we'd have the energy we'd need to stay online."

"Able had a spare stash of energy somewhere in his office," Mara says instantly. When Tron and Beck look at her curiously, she shrugs. "Able put me in charge, and I was supposed to, what? Not poke around a little? Unless he moved it, it should be in a compartment beneath his desk - there's a lot, enough for all of us at least for a few cycles."

Beck shoots Tron a look, but behind the faceplate, he's not sure if the security program is even paying attention to him.  _ Able had an energy store, huh?  _

"We'll take one of the lightrunners," one of the mechanics says, Asper, Beck thinks her name is, interrupting that line of thought, "they're smaller than a standard carrier, but it should be able to fit all of us if we attach a cargo linkup to it and squeeze. We'll disable its auxiliary lights, too: that should buy us some cover."

"We'll find the energy Mara mentioned," Beck says, motioning for Tron to follow as he heads toward the back office, "you all get started. Work fast."

 

x

 

"You're tired, Beck. You should rest," Tron says as soon as the office door slides shut behind them.

"I'm fine, Tron, I'll power down when we're out of here," Beck replies, moving forward toward Able's desk without stopping to acknowledge him.

"You fought an entire recognizer's worth of soldiers, Beck, and there are more coming - the programs out there need the Renegade functioning.  _ I  _ need you functioning."

"Who said I wasn't? Look, I know how far I can push myself, Tron, it's not like this is my first life-risking mission," Beck says, and ducks to tap a hand to one of the plates beneath Able's desk. Nothing happens. 

"Fine. If you're sure. I'll go help the others set up reinforcements for the hangar walls, they won't last the way they are now."

"Why was Able saving energy?" Beck asks. His back is turned to Tron, but he knows the program well enough by now to know his words have the intended effect. Tron is quiet for a long, tense moment.

"I'm sure he had a valid reason."

"I thought you were done with the whole  _ lying to me _ thing, Tron."

Beck can hear him sigh. It feels like he's always doing that - a world of trouble on Tron's shoulders, a lifetime of being programmed to do one thing: worry.

"I asked Able a long time ago for a favor. He was a program of his word, he did what I asked."

"You asked him to smuggle you energy. That's how you've been keeping the healing chamber going for all these years. You two knew each other that well?"

"Better, actually, once," Tron says quietly, and Beck turns to look at him. Here, with both of their faceplates off, Tron looks...

Tron looks  _ tired. _

"He was my friend, at the end, and that's something I never should have taken for granted. He protected me when I couldn't protect him."

"You want all of these programs to get out of here safely just as much as I do, and I know you want to protect them," Beck says gently. The next tile he taps stays inert, and he moves on to the one adjacent.

"I need to protect them, Beck. I let things get this bad - "

Beck watches his expression. It doesn't exactly break, because Tron is a sturdy program, made first and foremost to  _ withstand _ , but there's a pain there that he can't ignore. He realizes how much it must have hurt him, to train a Renegade as his apprentice, as his  _ replacement _ , knowing the one thing he was made to do, he couldn't.

"Then start by protecting me -  _ really  _ protecting me, Tron. No more lying, no more hiding things from me because you think it's for the better. We won't survive the next few cycles unless I know exactly what's going on."

The next tile slides aside as his hand makes contact, and a shelf rises up from the floor. As it does, hardlight sides take form, and the box rises completely out from its hiding spot filled with neat stacks of energy cylinders.

"Huh," Tron says as he sees it.

"What?"

"Able's last gift to us. That's more than enough to keep us all going for a metacycle, at least."

Tron crosses the room and grabs one of the cylinders, holding it loose in one hand. The blue glow mingles with his biolights. Something seems to reset in his expression, a resolution that loosens the set of his jaw.  _ Able's last gift to us is life,  _ Beck thinks,  _ the ability to fight another day. He's thinking the same thing. _

"You're right, Beck," Tron says, "I'm sorry. All I ever wanted was for you to not make the same mistakes I did. I wanted to keep you from that pain, but I hurt you myself instead. We always talked about this being bigger than both of us, but it truly is now. I can't let my fear of the past influence what I'm doing now."

Beck takes the cylinder from him. It's the same color as the T set high on his chest. The color that means hope.

"At least you learned your lesson," Beck replies, and smiles.

 

x

 

It doesn't take long for CLU's armada to come bearing down from overhead the garage, descending like the body of a massive serpent from the black void sky. The rattling they all feel in their cores gets stronger with every passing minute, until it vibrates through their teeth and their eyes, making focusing on their work hard. Beck wordlessly tasks Tron with finding them a decently remote route through the edges of Argon out to his base while Beck himself helps Asper, Mara, and Zed with the design of the submersible. 

Subs aren't common projects at Able's garage - they're one of the rarer modes of troop transportation and cargo freighting for the occupation, and since Argon's harbors were closed cycles ago by the government, they've mostly been docked against the Sea and left abandoned. Making one from scratch, or more accurately, repurposing it from another vehicle, isn't something Beck's programmed to know how to do, not like tuning up lightcycles or reconstructing the damaged code of a tank. But he's worked against his programming before, made himself an entirely new identity outside of his code; he knows he can do this, too. Nothing but a data compiler and his bracers, picking apart engines line by line and stringing their code back together in a new pattern - taking apart Beck and putting together the Renegade. Variations on a theme.

Beck grabs Mara's hand as she passes by him toward the toolbench to get a wrench and pulls her behind the half deconstructed lightfighter. Her light's dimmed, settling down into the calm pulse of her work, but as she looks up at him they begin to brighten again, circuits humming an overclocked thrum, and through her suit Beck can feel a subroutine activating -  _ worry. _

"What's going on?" She asks quietly.

"Look," Beck says, and wonders how she hasn't picked out his voice from through the distortion, if the visage of Tron is really that distracting, "Just because me and... the Renegade aren't leaving the city doesn't mean the rest of you have to stay. Once we make it to our base, you, Zed, and whoever else wants to should hop a transport to Bismuth."

Mara laughs, "You're joking, right? We're your  _ resistance _ , we're here to help you. How have you not gotten that past your firewall yet? When we leave, we all leave, and anything else is unacceptable." 

"You would've made a great Renegade, you know that, right?" Beck says, and places his hands on her shoulders. He's glad she's here, even through all of this. He's glad he can keep her and Zed close.

She laughs at him. "I think I'll leave that responsibility to you and him."

"Speaking of," Beck says under his breath as he catches his friend's faceplate tilted toward him half the room away. "You keep working, I'll be right back."

"I think I've found our way through," Tron says as Beck approaches, "but it's going to be tricky. My base is on the mountain range that separates Argon from the Outlands, and from the other side the Sea, but the terrain will still be rougher than in the city proper. There's also this - " Tron extends his disc, where a holo light map paints the outer systems of Argon. Beck can see, highlighted in red, a single line that cuts across the mountain pass.

"A blockade," Beck murmurs. 

Tron nods, "It must have gone up recently - to keep programs from escaping the city. To keep us contained."

Beck taps at the map until it expands toward the blockade. "Can't be any harder than taking out a recognizer, can it?"

Tron gives him a look. "It absolutely can. There's no way around it, so we'll have to go through it. The problem is, we can't let any of them know where we're going."

Beck sighs and crosses his arms. "Another distraction, then?"

Tron frowns, "This is a  _ blockade _ . None of the programs on that line will leave their stations, not even for Tron and the Renegade. That means we won't be followed, most likely, but not that they won't track us remotely, and not that they'll fall for any of our usual tricks."

"We have usual tricks?"

"We can go over," says someone behind Beck. He jumps, but it's only Asper, standing with her repair shields up, glowing a saturated lavender. She looks at the map, but doesn't try to touch it.

She gestures to the workshop around them - every lightjet and lightcruiser cut from its tethers, laying dormant and unlit, some reduced down to their batons and others fully rezzed.

"We have plenty of aircraft, if we can alter their altitude perimeters we should be able to fly right over them."

Beck looks over at Tron, who pauses for a beat.

"The mountain is surrounded by a perpetual storm generator. There's nothing that can fly through it and come out the other side without being derezzed."

Asper shrugs. "There's me."

Beck tilts his head at her curiously. 

"I'm a pilot, programmed to specialize in light to medium cargo transportation. This is light cargo transportation if I've ever seen it, so why not?"

"You're a pilot? Who works in a garage?" Tron asks. Asper shoots him a look.

"Like you were programmed for vigilante justice?"

"Do you think you can do it?" Beck cuts through. He looks out of the corners of his eyes at Tron, trying to get a read on the security program, but through the faceplate it's hard to pin down if he's actually considering it or not.

Asper looks at the map, studying it for a moment. Her biolights pulse once. 

"Yeah, I know I can. We'll just need a big enough ship."

"We'll take a 'cruiser baton with us," Beck says, "Can you alter its altitude perimeters?"

"Easy enough," Asper replies, and turns away to get started. 

The walls to the garage begin to shriek.

All of the mechanics cover their ears at once, some doubling over as the frequency mounts. Beck and Tron wince and step away from the nearest wall, only protected from the noise by their faceplates. They activate their battle subroutines in tandem.

From outside, they can all hear as the first recognizer sets down - more accurately, they can  _ feel  _ it, the massive pillars of code that slam home into the grid - and the next a half second after that, and the next, and the next. 

"Time to go!" Beck shouts.

"Is the sub ready?" Mara shouts back, all of them setting their vocal protocols to max volume to be heard over the resonance spilling from the walls and floor. 

"It'll have to be!" Tron replies, at the same time Zed yells "No!"

Asper looks over to Beck. He shakes his head, gesturing toward the bank of landed lightcruisers against the far wall. 

"Pick any of them! You'll have to do it as we go."

_ "Citizens of the grid,"  _

Tron and Beck both freeze. The metal of the walls distort the sound as it rips through the air, quaking with the volume, but the voice is unmistakable.

_ "Do not be afraid," _ CLU says, gently, _ "I've come to liberate you from the virus that's infected this city's code. Seditionists and traitors alike, right here in Argon. Today we  _ purge  _ them, and make this city clean once again." _

"It's time to go! Everyone together!" Tron shouts. Beck moves and gestures Zed forward.

"Derezz part of the floor, make a hatch," he says. Zed grabs a wrench without argument, and as Beck strikes down with his disc into the thick metal flooring, Zed opens the interface and expands the damaged code out into a perfect seven by seven square. Below, black water laps at the new edges.

Something strikes hard against the main hangar door, buckling the metal. The sound of a turret coming online and cycling reaches them. 

_ "If you surrender now," _ CLU says, implacably calm as the first pixels start to fall away from the hangar door, as the water laps and reaches up, blackout empty and cold, _ "I will derezz each of you personally. There's no need for you to suffer." _

"In!" Tron shouts, the sound tearing through his throat. For a moment the mechanics look at each other, fear in their circuits burning nova-bright, the deep thrum of their overclocked systems uniting them, and then one by one, they dive into the Sea. 

Behind them, the garage explodes into millions of pixels and screaming orange-red light.

 

x

 

Beck hits the water and immediately feels it swarm his circuits. It's  _ cold _ , achingly cold, the kind of cold that seizes up your processor as you sink to the bottom. He can feel his biolights throb against the dark, but even through the secondary cover of the Tron disc he knows they'll short out eventually - two minutes, three tops. In the whirling dark, he can see the faint lights of the rest of the mechanics, green and yellow and purple and pink and blue, all of them so far away and so dim, sinking slowly into the Sea.

_ Come on, _ he thinks, curling up tight against the system freeze wrapping itself around his circuits,  _ come on, Tron! _

In a bright burst of white-blue, Beck sees through his faceplates the schematic of a massive submersible take form out of the black. Its components etch themselves in quickly as he watches, and then his back hits solid metal and he gasps as pain shoots up through his port. His subroutines try to trigger his faceplate release, but he overrides it and instead twists over onto his side and coughs, trying to shake the phantom pain of white-hot cold water.

"Are you alright?" Tron asks from above him. The program extends a hand and crouches, lifting him into a sitting position and putting a hand on his back, just over his disc port. 

"Fine," Beck manages. "Cut it a little close there, didn't you?"

He can tell Tron's smirking behind the faceplate. "Always do. Come on, we're not out of this yet. I need you to watch our tail, make sure no one comes after us. We've killed the lights - that should give us some cover."

"Who's driving?" Beck asks. 

"Mara."

As he stands, he can take in the full layout of their handmade submersible. The general design of the sub still has the architecture of a lightcruiser - the main cabin flanked by two broad propellers issuing them forward, a tail that's been repurposed into a rudder. Either wing is fitted with guns, and so is the turret mount affixed to the back. Beck takes his place there, watching through the viewport for anything stirring in the incomprehensible darkness. Their circuit lights are down, their ship in blackout as it cleaves through the water, but the internal lights pulse a soft blue. Beck does a quick headcount, and comes up one short. 

"We're missing one."

Zed, sitting on a hardlight bench at one side of the cabin, looks down at his clasped hands and shakes his head. 

"Yeah, Aurora. He was next to me when the turret fired - it knocked him back. He never made it into the water."

Beck lets his head drop, just for a second, but keeps his shoulders steady. They'll have time to mourn, but for now a moment of grief is all he can allow himself. There are still twenty-six programs on this ship who need him, need all of him, present and ready. He can only distance the feeling so much, though, and he knows it's not a skill any of his new team have had to develop, so he lets himself put a comforting hand on Zed's shoulder.

"I'm sorry," he says quietly, "he deserved better than that." 

"Yeah," Zed replies as he looks away, "he did. But it isn't your fault. I'll take up the grievance with CLU."

"Is everyone else alright?" Tron asks the assembled group. They've broken off into pairs and groups of threes, resting against the sides of the ship or sitting on hard light benches with their elbows braced on their knees. Beck can name each and every one of them - he's had shifts with them all, asked a few for spare wrenches, a few others to come out for drinks with him, Mara, and Zed. Even though he's not Beck right now -  _ can't  _ be Beck right now - he can feel each of their lives pressing down on his shoulders. The loss of Aurora doesn't ease any of that weight, but adds to it, compounding, until it feels like his circuits might snap. 

"The Sea isn't a pleasant experience," Tron says softly, and Beck looks up at him from across the room. His circuit lights have faded completely now from the shock of the Sea, back to his original cluster of biolights. He's not just talking to him, though, but to the entire ship. "I know. We won't resurface for another millicycle or so, so try to rest for now. When we get to the base, then you can power down safely." 

Beck sits in the turret station and watches the Sea spill behind them, the currents pushed by the sub making swirls of pixels in the water.

"You'll have to tell them, eventually," Tron says under his breath from behind his right shoulder. Beck doesn't react, but pulls his knee up closer to his chest. "There's no point in keeping it secret anymore - these programs are wanted, now. There's nothing the occupation can hold over you."

"Yeah," Beck says, "I'll tell them."

Tron crouches beside him to get him at eye-level.

"Beck, the whole  _ no more lying _ is a two-way street. Once we get to the base, you can tell Mara and Zed personally, at least."

"I've kept this from them for so long," Beck says, "and I don't regret it, not at all. But this still feels wrong. They'll think I didn't trust them enough, or that I think being the Renegade was more important than being  _ me." _

"Do you know," Tron says, sitting down fully on the floor and leaning his back against the glass of the leftmost viewport, keeping his faceplate on the Sea as the sub cuts through it, "that back before Flynn left the grid, way back when me and CLU kept the peace, programs would call being thrown in jail 'being tron'd'?"

Beck snorts. Tron shakes his head.

"No idea how it caught on, either. The point is I've never had to distance myself from my identity. Being a security program is the core of what I am, all I've ever done. You're different. You've kept people safe by hiding a part of you from them, at great personal cost. Mara and Zed, the rest of the grid, they'll understand that. You've done this,  _ all of this,  _ Beck, to keep them safe. There's something noble in that."

"Thanks," Beck says, and looks over at him, "I mean it."

Tron waves a hand, dismissing it. Against the backdrop of the Sea, he looks almost invisible, delineated only by the biolights of his suit. Beck could pick those lights out of any crowd, just like he could Mara's or Zed's. The security program had become a friend more than a mentor somewhere down the line, someone he was afraid to lose.

"Cutler knew," Beck murmurs, "at the very end, he knew. I was willing to risk that, to get through to him. So why does this feel different?"

"I don't know," Tron admits, "but I think somehow you do. It won't matter in a few millicycles, anyway."

"Yeah," Beck says, and turns his head away, "Yeah, you're right."

 

x

 

_ “I can’t wait for you to meet him, man,” Flynn says, slinging an arm over Tron’s shoulders. The familiar weight of his creator makes him smile, just a little. Flynn isn’t like the programs he created - he reaches out, touches others, uses the contact of his hands and arms to comfort, to protect.  _

_ “Sam’s a good kid - he’s smart, just like his dad,” Flynn continues, and laughs at his own joke. Tron looks out to the portal cresting the horizon, breaking through the cloud barrier as a beacon of pure white light. He wonders what lies beyond - the user world, the one where the skies are always lit, by sun, by stars, by moonlight.  _

_ “One day once we’re ready, I’ll bring him in. He’ll love you!” _

_ Tron hides his smile behind a hand. Flynn’s enthusiasm is infectious. For everything his creator is, Tron is most thankful for that - his unabiding love for the grid, for him, for them all.  _

_ “I can’t wait to meet him,” Tron says.  _

 

x

 

They make land sooner than expected - half a millicycle later Mara pulls up on the accelerator and turns her head toward the main cabin. 

"Land ahoy," she says, but there's no real excitement behind it. Even standing next to her, Beck can feel  _ dread  _ activate in her circuits. He turns to look back toward the turret mount, where Tron is still in standby slumped against the glass viewport, head tilted back. The reprogrammer restored him, of course, but Tron still has megacycles of fatigue to overcome. 

Beck shifts his gaze toward Asper and gets a nod. She’d finished the altitude adjustments on the way over.

“Alright, everyone, one last push and we’ll be home free. Pair off - I don’t want anyone getting lost in the storm, and it’ll be easier to rezz the ‘cruiser around us.”

Beck crosses to the back of the main cabin and rests a hand on Tron’s shoulder. The program comes online immediately, arms coming up to reach for his disc on instinct, but in a nanosecond he reorients himself and looks up at Beck through the faceplate with a calm recognition.

“We’re here,” Beck says. He offers Tron a hand up, and lifts the security program to his feet. Tron shakes his head slightly, like he’s trying to unstick a particularly stubborn thought from his processor.

“I dreamed of Flynn,” he whispers, “first time in gigacycles.”

Beck smiles beneath his visor. “Can only be a good sign, right?”   
Tron huffs. “We should get going.”

The two dozen programs spill out onto shore - the perpetual storm of the outer rim of Argon rages, unceasing and unchanging, whipping pixels of snow through their little group. The wind makes Beck shiver, but he offlines his core temperature warnings and gestures Asper forward.

“We’ll be flying through a storm,” Beck reminds everyone at a half-yell, “so I need you all on alert for occupation forces. Hopefully we can get by undetected, but the cloud cover will make it hard to see. Ready?”

His little resistance nods. Asper readies herself at the top of their formation, where the pilot’s cradle will rezz around her, and takes off at a run. The rest of them follow, two pillars of programs, with Tron and Beck at the rear. 

The lightcruiser stutters as its schematic unfurls around them, pixelated snow rushing through the framework, and for a second Beck thinks the ship won’t even rezz, but the hardlight grafts itself to the walls and the floor in an instant, turning to solid metal as its coding engages, and the twenty-six of them are suddenly aloft. 

Things go south quickly.

“We’re not gaining altitude!” Asper yells from the helm. Her visor has come down over her face from the crown of her head, pulsing purple, but through the light Beck can see her eye renders begin to static as her interface with the ship begins to fail.

“Push it higher!” Tron yells back. He steadies Zed as the program stumbles, momentum suddenly changing as the storm buffets the ‘cruiser back. 

“I  _ can’t!” _

“Work the problem, mechanics!” Mara orders, and opens her compiler against one of the walls. On the other side of the ship, Plex opens his own, and in sync they pull up the schematics for their respective wings. Beck grabs a wrench and plugs it into an aperture that spirals open at the tail end, resolving into the image of a thruster housing.

“Pull the wings up, get us more air beneath them! Power up the rear thruster, push us forward!” Asper directs. Mara, Plex, and Beck rezz their bracers in unison and pull at the clusters of data spilling out of their compilers. Around them, the lightcruiser groans, the sounding rising into a shriek, and then Beck activates the rear thruster and the noise is drowned out by a burst of bass that rocks each and every one of them. Tron catches another program as they begin to tumble back, and Asper grits her teeth through a wordless yell as she pulls hard against the control bars. 

“We’re through the lower clouds!” She says after a second, “kill the thruster, Tron, the wings will do the rest of the work. Check our alt for me.”

“Thirteen hundred dpi, we’re climbing!” Beck shouts back. 

Mara slumps against the wall, her compiler shutting down. “Thank Flynn,” she mutters.

Asper gestures and the altitude interface is flung from Beck’s compiler over to the main control HUD.

“Give us some more windows,” Tron instructs Plex, who nods. After a second, the walls of the lightcruiser break down into thick glass panels and polarize.

“Good job, everyone,” Beck says softly. Across the cabin, Zed gives him a relieved smile and a thumbs up.

“We’re not done yet,” Tron says, “but we’re nearly through it. Everyone, keep an eye out.”

Beck does a head count. He sighs, counting a neat twenty six including himself. They’re all still here, all together. 

Beck stops his processor from putting together his next thought, but the pain of it still rips through his circuits.

_ For now. _

 

x

 

CLU holds the program’s disc in one hand, tapping it against the recognizer’s flat plane of glass that overlooks Argon. Beyond, towards the south of the city, plumes of smoke rise in pre-programmed spires. 

“What a shame,” he murmurs.

“Sir, I take full responsibility,” comes a weak voice from behind him. It doesn’t break, the sound, but the static nearly overtakes the words, making them soft and unintelligible around the edges.

“I intercepted the Renegade and Tron on your recognizer, but I wasn’t able to stop them.”

CLU notices the lack of  _ I’m sorry  _ in the words, graciously allows it without a word and clasps his hands behind his back.

He’s a newer program, fresh out of alpha testing, he can tell. Programs like CLU, members of the old guard, the ones created before the Purge, they can always tell. It’s something in the hum of their circuits, a sharper and higher whine than programs who have seen a few gigacycles. It’s something in the proportions, too - CLU smiles to himself; the further away from Flynn’s original design the grid gets, the less and less programs so closely resemble the users they were originally modeled after. He wonders how many generations away they are from rezzing programs completely alien to the eyes of users. He’ll look forward to that, in quieter moments.

He turns, watching the program before him duck his eyes in deference accordingly, the way Dyson and Tesler at the other end of the room straighten their spines. 

“Oh, my boy,” CLU says, paternal, gesturing as if about to lay a hand on the program’s shoulder without actually making contact. “You say that as though you haven’t already given me a great gift.”

CLU turns the disc over in his hands, stark red on black, and activates the memory core within. 

A hundred pixels spring to life, manifesting a holo image of a black visor and screaming white-blue disc, caught mid motion with the architecture of his recognizer behind him. 

“The identity of the Renegade himself.”

The program ducks his head as CLU scrubs through the last half-millicycle, taking his time to commit every capture to his hard drive memory.

“You knew him,” CLU says, curious, “didn’t you, Cutler?”

“I -”

CLU waves his hand through the memory, and it shifts forward to the black-plate armored figure laying flat on his back, a crack in his visor chipping into pixels, a shout building in his throat distorted through the faceplate and the distance of second-hand memory. In the next moment the visor is retracted, and the wide fearful eyes of the Renegade stare back at him, motionless in the capture but still dripping with lifelike exactness.

“Identify,” CLU orders Cutler quietly. 

Cutler raises his head just enough to look through the holo image at CLU, the eyes of the Renegade superimposed over him, blue-washed brown on crystalline grey. 

“Beck 1-PDX, function: mechanic. I met him in the games, before my… before my glitch was corrected.”

CLU nods his head and shuts the memory core down. He steps forward, offering the disc to Cutler. As the program takes it, CLU lets his grip linger for just a moment, cocking his head at the program. 

“The first of the PDX operating system,” CLU says to himself, still looking at Cutler, “Interesting.”

In a sharp twist of his wrist, CLU takes back Cutler’s disc. With another, Tesler derezzes. 

CLU catches the disc as it ricochets back to him easily, and wipes the edge with the sleeve of his cloak. He hands it back to the program.

“You’re dismissed. Back to work.”

Cutler bows his head and resheathes his disc, turning on a heel to exit the room. 

The remaining programs don’t move for a tense second. 

“Dyson, you’re now the Overseer of Argon. Congratulations. Commander Paige, you’ll be transferred to General Dyson’s command. Commander Pavel, I expect you on the next carrier out to Purgos.”   
He listens as the three of them sing a chorus of “Yes, sir”s and waves a hand to dismiss them.

CLU turns back to the viewport.

“It’s not your turn yet, old friend,” he murmurs to the city of Argon, spread out before him shining yellow in the reflected light of his fleet. “Be patient.”

 

x

 

Three and a half levels down from CLU’s chamber, Cutler hits the emergency stop on the levetator platform and stares down at his disc. The hot sheen of discharged pixels paints one edge a golden orange, the color of CLU’s biolights. He falls to his knees, face inches from the disc, and activates the memory cores again. It takes him less than a second to scrub through to Beck’s face, lit by the recognizer’s engine room, staring up at him with an agony on his face Cutler doesn’t understand. His suit’s biolights are overclocked, pulsing white in the memory’s holo image. As he watches, the memory slows to a quarter speed, the first shapes of “ _ Cutler! Wake up!”  _ forming on Beck’s lips, the T on his chest a burning star.

He can feel the weight of Beck’s hands on his forearm, the drag of his fingers through his as Cutler dropped into the belly of the engine, the two bright white figures crawling further and further away as he fell.

_ Why can he  _ feel  _ that? _

_ “Emergency stop engaged, please wait for further assistance. Emergency stop en - “ _

Cutler rises and slams his palm on the all stop, disengaging the mounts that had sprung out of their manifolds to stop the platform. It began to descend again. 

With a sharp click, the memory core offlines, and Cutler resheathes his disc, staring into a middle space of bright orange-red nothing.

 

x

 

“You should power down,” Tron says to Beck under his breath, “try to get some rest before we land. I’ll wake you up if anything happens.”

Beck crosses his arms and pulls up his internal alerts - being thrown into standby isn’t something he wants, not now, not when things can go so wrong so quickly, but there’s still things to be done, ways he can help, plans he can make with Tron to make the next few cycles count. 

_ “Beck,” _ Tron hisses, sensing the pause, “I wasn’t asking. Your energy reserves have to be dangerously low right about now, and I can’t have you going into shutdown. Go power down.”

Beck looks over at him as he turns away, toward the helm of the ship. “You’ll wake me if something happens,” he says - he’s not asking, either. 

Tron nods, and Beck crosses the cabin to sit on the floor just to the side of the cockpit.

“How’re you doing, Asper?” He asks. 

The pilot program scans the horizon, or at least, what she can see of it through the cloud cover, and shrugs. 

“I’ve been worse. Haven’t seen anybody out here so far, and we’re flying stable, at least.”

“Good. You did good work, back there,” Beck says. 

She cracks a smile - rare, for her. Those have been few and far between in the last cycle, for everyone. 

“Thanks. That means a lot, actually, coming from Tron.”

_ Right,  _ Beck thinks, and touches the T pulsing at the hollow of his throat with the tips of his fingers. 

“You can power down for a while, you know,” Asper says, a bit quieter, almost conspiratorial, “I won’t tell the others if you do. There’s nothing yet, but I’ll keep watch.”   
“Thank you,” Beck says, and begins the sequence to enter sleep mode.

 

x

 

_ “Hey! Watch it!” _

_ Beck pulls his lightcycle up short, the circuit he’d been riding down screeching beneath him as he decelerates suddenly. _

_ The program in front of him crosses their arms. Behind them, the neon-blue sign of Abel’s Garage flickers in its holowrap and drenches the street in residual color. The harbor to their right laps at the dock, smooth Sea air. _

_ “You make a habit of almost running down innocent programs in the street?” The program asks. Beck smiles and derezzes his visor. With a simple gesture, his lightcycle breaks down and he gathers the baton in one hand. _

_ “Only when I’m late for work,” he says. _

_ The program’s expression changes in an instant, the light in their eyes suddenly growing warm and enveloping their face. _

_ “You must be the new guy! Well, well, well, speed racer, looks like I’m your welcoming committee! Designation’s Bodhi - come on, I’ll introduce you to the rest of the crew.” _

 

 

x

 

 

_end part one_


	2. part two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“C and T,” Flynn says, staring out at the grid that comes to life under his feet, and chuckles. “Create and Transform. Right on, man.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> back again! this thing's not gonna have a set schedule, huh?  
> muse(ic) is conrad by sohn
> 
> enjoy, and i love you!  
> -p
> 
> obligatory warning label: canon-typical violence, references to brainwashing (Cutler's reprogramming, specifically)

 

_ part two _

  
  


Beck onlines already sitting upright, a subroutine activated during his sleep cycle transmitting  _ tense  _ and  _ ache.  _ His battle core cycles into standby on instinct, but Beck dismisses the ping to his processor and leans back as he realizes where he is.

Where they are.

The lightcruiser swoops low over a range of snow-capped spires, jagged teeth of code that rise up to meet their dim blue-white light, the low-level hum of the engine cores trembling through the main cabin. Asper steers, eyes fixed on the horizon, keeping them low and stable though the terrain bucks beneath them. 

“How close are we?” Beck asks as he rises. 

Mara and Zed, leaning against the left hand viewport, turn their heads toward him. 

“Not far,” Tron says from the opposite side. He has a hand on the glass, bright cyan code unfurling over the surface from the pads of his fingers. “I’m checking our speed and alt against the map now.” 

“We haven’t spotted anyone yet,” Mara says. She’s one of the only programs still online - some of the mechanics have fallen into sleep mode standing up, others obviously in standby sitting with their knees pulled up and staring unblinkingly through the glass. The air around them is charged with anxiety, but also with the exhaustion from the last few millicycles finally coming to bear down on their circuitry. Beck’s only ever felt this worn down after Tron’s kicked his ass around the training room for a few hours, and never this scared. Not facing down Tesler at the plaza, not when Cutler’s biolights had shimmered a deep burning orange, not the countless times Paige had held her disc to his neck.

“We’re nearly there,” Tron says. “I’m transmitting the coordinates to you now, Asper. Take us in easy.”

“Aye aye,” Asper says, “Sable, come over here, I need your help for the descent.”

Sable, a lightjet specialist with pale pink biolights, crosses the main floor toward the cockpit. Beck passes them going the other way, and stops in front of Mara and Zed. 

“You should both get some rest,” Beck says, “Asper and Sable can handle it from here. I’ll keep watch.”

Zed shakes his head. “I don’t think I could power down if I wanted to,” he mutters, eyes still fixed on the clouds that jag through the mountains.

Beck opens his mouth to say something to that, to insist they both rest, when across the room, Copper lets out a wordless shriek. 

“They’ve spotted us!” Tron yells. In an instant every program on the ship is fully online and booting up their battle routines, scanning the sky for what Copper sees. 

Beck sees it first - the long reds of a lightcruiser passing through the clouds above them, vast and predatory and incredibly silent. 

“Tron!” Tron calls out, and for a second Beck doesn’t respond, doesn’t think to turn his head toward the security program. 

“We’ll take the lightjets, try to distract it,” Tron continues when Beck finally registers that it’s  _ him  _ he’s talking to.

“There’s no way you guys will be able to make that!” Mara says, “the cloud cover is too dense, and the storm’s still going!” 

Beck shakes his head. “We don’t need to outfly them, just get their attention a little. We’ll meet back up with you, I promise.” 

Zed rezzes the bay door for the two of them. Tron hands Beck a baton, and they stand, shoulder-to-shoulder, bracing for the wind.

“Not used to being called that, are you?” Tron murmurs. Beck shakes his head just a fraction, enough for him to see out of the corner of his eye.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be.”

Zed releases the bay hatch, and the two of them drop vertically into freefall.

 

x

 

Beck  _ loves  _ this feeling, the rush of light it lends his circuits, the altimeter warning that pops into his processor, the way the wind consumes  _ everything -  _ sound, sight, the feeling of his cores lurching, his center of gravity trying to correct but finding no purchase. 

He laughs, knowing the sound will never reach Tron through the whipping wind of the drop, and rolls horizontally. As he flips he activates the ‘jet, and there’s not a moment of hesitation as his body completes the roll and the schematic of the ship rezzes before he hits the thrusters and takes off.

The lightjet hurtles upward, snarling against the squall. After a second its twin spirals into view, and Beck sees Tron pull in tight circles around the shaft of his hardlight ribbon. 

The occupation lightcruiser is a deep broiling red on black, flying above the clouds but fixed firmly on the tail of the larger ship crisscrossing through the mountains below. 

Beck opens fire as they crest the clouds, his lightjet slowing for a heart-stopping second as it reaches the top of its arch, a hail of laserfire piercing through the left wing of the lightcruiser as he begins to drop. Beck guides his lightjet down and under the belly of the larger ship, watching as Tron circles overhead before diving to strafe the top of the ‘cruiser. 

They’ve definitely got their attention now; the lightcruiser banks, igniting its hardlight and swerving to try to tangle them in the ribbons. Tron and Beck go over and under, respectively, and meet side-by-side as they take another dive toward the turret mounts. 

“Just like old times, huh?” Beck shouts through the one-to-one linkup. 

“What old times?” Tron asks, but he can hear the barely-contained laughter the security program is trying to smother.

Beck flips and drives his laserfire into the left wing again. Something sparks, and the entire codeline suddenly dissolves into a flash of fire. His momentum carriers him under the belly of the ‘cruiser and up the right side, climbing higher and higher as the lightcruiser starts to sink, full-body tremors cracking through its framework.

“I think that should do it,” Tron says through the linkup, “time to head back -”

A stream of red laser fire engulfs Beck’s ship.

Tron dives immediately, unaware if he shouts or calls out Beck’s name, the programming not in him to care if he screams. 

The blue lightjet goes into blackout on impact, the wings and cockpit enveloped in sparkling red-orange fire. Tron pings Beck, but over the distance can’t get a response. 

The security program rolls, allowing the lightcruiser to overtake him as it continues to fall. He narrowly avoids a secondary burst of laserfire himself, but presses the thrusters into full burn to reach the crumbling, half-derezzed lightjet. 

Tron changes course as he sees something much smaller fall from the cockpit, now completely upside down, and drops with circuit-breaking speed to follow it. 

The security program deactivates the cockpit’s hatch, a sudden torrent of wind trying to lift him out of the ‘jet entirely, but he presses further forward and ignites the thruster, trying to outpace the figure of Beck in freefall.

It’s not smooth, but as soon as he’s eye-level with Beck, Tron rips the lightjet sideways, reaching up with both hands extended and keeping himself inside the cockpit by locking down his boots with the stirrups programmed into the bottom. 

A shower of pixels scatter across Tron’s faceplate and the ‘jet is jerked by the sudden weight of Beck’s form, but it takes Tron no time at all to compensate and throw the wings out wide and pivoted to catch the draft of the wind, pulling them both into a rough glide. 

Tron banks, and only pauses to look down at his friend, half-curled around him within the small cradle of the cockpit, when their trajectory matches back up with their lightcruiser’s. 

Tron’s circuits freeze. In a moment of absolute vacuum, the sky and Sea and light and  _ air  _ are gone, all chased out of his processor, and his core programming recoils. 

Beck’s arm is gone. 

A fever-bright tear of blue pixels ends at Beck’s left shoulder with absolutely nothing below it. The entire arm has been derezzed. The damage curls around the top of the shoulder, a massive wound that ends just over the T at the hollow of his throat. The symbol is unrecognizable through the damage. 

Tron’s programming  _ howls.  _

The program is in hard shutdown, he can tell - his pings bounce off, don’t even register with Beck’s code. He doesn’t want to, but Beck won’t survive the next few minutes without medical patching, and the only way to do it in his state is for Tron to activate the subroutine manually.

The ‘jet wobbles as Tron lifts Beck’s disc from its port, but the ship remains steady enough for the security program to activate the preservation core and begin to sift through the lines of code.

Dark cobalt pixels coat the outer lines of Beck’s wounds and begin to press inward as he works, smothering the lighter blue of the derezz, but there’s nothing in Beck’s code that will allow Tron to kick the patching into overdrive, to heal him faster. There’s nothing in Tron’s programming that knows how to  _ do this,  _ either, just instinct and a dizzying smear of panic.

With a snarl, Tron deactivates the disc and places it back in Beck’s port, guiding the lightjet into a low coast over the spiny peaks of the mountains. He can get to his base faster than the ‘cruiser if he pushes it; they’ll just have to follow close to his tail.

Tron enters the hangar of the base through a holo image masker, one that shields the entrance and displays just another stretch of smooth black rock covered in snow to the rest of the grid. The lightcruiser hesitates behind him, but lands smoothly half a second after he does. 

Tron doesn’t waste time; he drags Beck from the lightjet and slings him over one shoulder, the full weight of the program intensified after the dogfight they’d just been in, but Tron pushes through it and sets them both on the levetator platform heading up toward the atrium. He can barely see the first gush of programs from the ‘cruiser entering the hangar from over the lip of the platform, but ignores them completely in favor of trying to keep Beck steady against the hard code of his shoulder while desperately pinging the program, over and over, one after another bouncing off the protective shell of system shutdown.  _ You can’t ping what’s not there,  _ Tron thinks, and then shakes his head to dislodge it from his processor.

Cyrus’ virus had done more damage than Tron had originally thought - he hadn’t seen much of the state of things, given his damage, but  _ this… _

He can see signs of Cyrus’ hatred all over the walls, the blackout of the internal operating system, the dull pulse of internal lights kicked into gear by auxiliary power, the  _ healing chamber.  _

Tron hisses. The front glass has been blown out, dissolved into thousands of dead pixels, the main power conduit that threaded through the back coupling fried, the overhead generator that produced an energy mist that permeated his circuits seemingly ripped from its moorings by some kind of explosion. 

_ Useless,  _ Tron realizes in a moment of guttural clarity, one that rocks his core processor with a sinking kind of dread,  _ it’s destroyed.  _

Tron lays Beck port-down, trying to be gentle with the patchwork done to his left side, and places a hand on either side of the healing chamber’s back coupling. 

“ _ Tron!  _ What’s going on - “

Tron turns, in a fraction of a second too late to realize his visor is down, to even think of commanding his suit to reactivate it, to do anything but watch in helpless panic as Mara and Zed enter the atrium from the levetator and take in the chaos, the two of them, and their  _ faces.  _

“ _ Beck,”  _ Zed whispers.

Tron closes his eye renders, sealing everything off, letting his programmed directives wash over him. They tell him to fix this, to fix Beck, to confront the breach in security and patch it, to  _ protect his friend.  _

“The structure of the healing chamber is mostly intact,” Tron says, “and the operating display is still functional. Can you fix this?”

Mara has her eyes trained, unblinking, on Tron. Zed’s never leave Beck’s form, widening into gyres of dark pixelated pain and recognition.

“You’re - “ Mara starts.

_ “Yes,”  _ Tron hisses, caught in his throat as a half-shout, “now can you fix this!”

That seems to shake Mara free of whatever system error she’d been looping through, and the mechanic immediately crosses the atrium to Tron’s side, nudging him out of the way and activating her mechanic shielding. The bracers and visor are the brightest points of light in the room.

“I have no idea, but I’ll try,” she says.

“Help me get him up,” Tron instructs Zed, gesturing to Beck. He kneels, gently grasping the nape of Beck’s neck to pull him into an upright position. When the program hesitates, Tron looks up at him, and through a voice searing with fear, says, “ _ Please,  _ Zed.”

Zed nods, and comes back to himself in a second. His eye renders are still wide, never leaving Beck’s face, but he crouches on Tron’s other side and lifts Beck’s legs enough that they can shuffle him upright and lean him between them.

“Mara,” Tron says.

“It’s a complex system, I’m working as fast as I can,” Mara replies, collected, calm in her work.

It takes a full agonizing minute, but Mara steps away from the back coupling and says “put him inside” while she begins opening her data compiler to construct a new glass casing. Zed steps aside to help her as Tron sets Beck down on the floor of the chamber. His eyes catch on the bright white suit, and then on Tron’s biolights.

“If he’s not Tron, then  _ you’re  _ \- “

“Yes, thank you, it’s great to meet you, Beck’s told me so much about you. Now  _ focus up,  _ program.”

Zed shakes himself and activates his own shielding. The two mechanics form from opposite sides a solid light barrier, encasing the chamber in code, before it etches out into thick glass and engages.

Tron moves to the control panel and begins the warm-up sequence. He motions for Mara and Zed to stand clear, and the mechanics step back accordingly.

“He’s injured badly,” Mara says in a soft voice, one that makes Tron’s programming queue. “Is he going to be okay?”

“I don’t know,” Tron says, because he knows the truth, and the truth is that the likelihood of Beck surviving hangs at a vanishingly slim 21.6%. Mara can run the numbers, too - there’s no point in hiding it from her.

The healing chamber activates, a full-setting system reintegration that should take over the work Beck’s patch subroutine had been doing, strengthen the code links already made and cover them over in shiny new firewall. Should.

“It will take awhile,” Tron says in a soft voice, and then turns to the other two programs in the room. 

“We should talk.”

 

x

 

Paige waits patiently by the entrance to General Dyson’s quarters. Though her visor is lowered to hide her expression, it doesn’t hide the faint, quick breaths that drag through her lungs. Each moment of silence is an eternity, another bubble of anger and fear she can feel in her throat rising into her mouth, where it’s popped by her teeth renders before it can escape and swallowed back down. 

Tesler hadn’t made a noise when he’d derezzed - he hadn’t had time to, his processors too slow in comparison to the speed of the disc that had hit him center-mass. He’d crumbled just like CLU’s recognizer had, all disabled parts and system errors at the end. It’s the same silence that bothers Paige now. The fear that she’d be too slow to scream, to register her end of line, just like Tesler had.

Dyson’s summons pings at the entrance. Paige turns and, after a half-second hesitation, issues the door aside and steps into his ready room.

“I know this isn’t exactly  _ ideal  _ for you, Commander,” Dyson says. His back is to her, arms folded, watching data crop up on the far wall as reports return to him from the search-and-destroy teams sweeping the streets of Argon. 

_ My city,  _ Paige thinks. 

“But CLU’s orders were very clear. You’re to work under me now. I think that’s something the two of us can make work, don’t you?”

Paige resets her vocal queue in a synthesized cough of static. “Yes, sir.”

“Excellent. Now I know you’ve had some…  _ trouble,  _ in the past, with your coworkers -” Paige drops her gaze to the floor, “I’m aiming to change that. I’ve taken the liberty of promoting a guard captain to be your new partner under my command, to help  _ ease  _ the workload. I want you to keep an eye out for him, Commander; his reinstallation was tricky, and I don’t want him falling back on  _ old habits. _ ”   
Something about the way he says that makes Paige shiver in her very core - it’s something about the way he calls her  _ Commander,  _ too, the impassiveness of it all, the impersonal touch. Tesler had called her by her designation.

_ But Tesler is derezzed,  _ Paige reminds herself,  _ and CLU threw the disc that did it. _

He hadn’t even said anything. One of his Generals, a program he’d entrusted the entirety of Argon to, was suddenly no longer useful to him, and by extension, to the occupation. CLU had no room in his programming to allow for useless programs. 

Paige feels Dyson ping the door again, and senses another program enter the room to stand at her side. They’re of a height, but this program holds themself with a loose ease, a coiled tension that can barely be seen.

“Commander Paige, your new counterpart,” Dyson introduces, tilting his head to look over his shoulder at the two of them, eyes empty. “Commander Cutler.”

 

x

 

CLU enters his command room. The officers within fall silent in a unified wave, a perfect swathe of silence. It’s something he likes, he thinks - the uniformity, the harmony, the  _ structure _ of it. Any room he walks into is suddenly a silent one, a still one.

CLU takes the head of the table, not bothering to rezz a seat; this won’t take long.

“Argon has become forfeit,” he announces. His officers, the highest-ranking members of his brass he’d brought with him, share a look. At his right, Dyson stares implacably forward. 

“This city has been infected _.  _ A hotbed for treason, sedition,  _ chaos.  _ General Tesler’s forces failed in corralling this infection, and so it’s spread. This isn’t a failure I’m keen on continuing. Argon will be quarantined. Shortly after, we will begin reformatting.”

“Reformatting, sir?” Dyson asks. “We haven’t evacuated the city - the recognizers are still sweeping for the Renegade and his ilk.”

“We won’t evacuate the city,” CLU says, calm, and places a hand on the long table in the center of the room. Its circuitry ignites at his touch, and with a thought a holo map of Argon springs to life, shining and golden. It’ll be bathed in that color soon, CLU thinks, a complete and perfect cradle for his digital utopia.

“The Renegade hasn’t been spotted since he destroyed the recognizer a cycle ago, and none of the blockades at the edges of the city have reported anything besides a lightcrusier that went missing during a search. He’s somewhere here, within the city. We’ll perfect it, sector by sector, until either we find him, or he tries to stop us. Either way, we’ll flush him out.”

“I see, sir. Understood.”

CLU waves a hand, and the holo spins, the 3D map rotating on an axis as its component pixels are broken down, swallowed in a warm wave of yellow, and restructured. The new skyline of Argon is a beacon, is  _ perfect.  _

“We begin at the upcycle.”

He dismisses his officers, but keeps a hand on Dyson’s shoulder until the last program is out of the room. CLU is still peering into the holo map as he says, “It goes against Tron’s programming to allow this. He’ll come.”

_ Now, now it’s your turn. Your move. Come on. _

 

x

 

Tron gathers the assembled mechanics in the atrium, taking in the long lines of their expressions and the way each of them holds themself with exhaustion running clear and bold through their biolights. These are Beck’s programs, he realizes as he watches them all cluster around, these are his resistance, the programs he’s sworn to keep safe.

_ But they’re yours to protect, too,  _ Tron reminds himself. His gaze slides sidelong to the healing chamber Beck’s been strapped into for half a millicycle now. He hasn’t come out of hard shutdown yet. 

“Programs, there’s something we haven’t told you,” Tron begins. After a pause he sighs, and triggers the code to deactivate his faceplate. He pushes through the confused noises and gasps of a handful of mechanics and continues, “Tron lives.”

From the back of the crowd, the program he recognizes as Copper snorts in disbelief.

Asper’s eyes flicker toward the figure in the nearly-opaque healing chamber, and Tron follows her line of thought to its conclusion.

“The identity of the Renegade is his and his alone to disclose,” Tron says firmly. “But it’s time for me to stop hiding. I am Tron. I live.”

With a hand that he forces to keep steady, he unsheathes his disc and holds it horizontally against the T on his chest. With a tap, the disc comes to life, a data cloud of intense density forming, its core programming tenants complex to the point of being almost indecipherable. He and CLU were the originals, the forward guard of Flynn - they were designed to be intricate.

The mechanics gasp, the light of his disc a brilliant white in the half-light of the atrium.

He sifts through the code, finding the one line that will prove his identity, something no program could inject into their own binary lines, something only accessible to editing by a system admin. Flynn.

A stark white T surrounded by a circle of data clusters. It’s a near-twin to CLU’s, the core of their systems. 

_ “C and T,” Flynn says, staring out at the grid that comes to life under his feet, and chuckles. “Create and Transform. Right on, man.” _

“You’re him,” Asper says in a faint voice, “you’re really him.”   
Tron deactivates the disc and resheathes it into his port. His symbol glows a steady light where it rests just below his collarbone. “I really am. There’s no point in hiding this from any of you anymore - you’re in the most amount of danger you can be already. Welcome to the other side of the equation, programs - you’re all enemies of the state.”   
“The enemy  _ is  _ the state,” Mara insists lowly. Tron blinks at her; Beck’s words, finding new purchase. Funny, how things tend to never change.

“The point is,” Tron continues, “from this moment forward we work together as a team. I won’t hide from you anymore, but I expect the same level of trust in return. There’s no room for individual grudges, for personal slights or ulterior motives; we work as one, or we don’t work at all, compute? We’re at war, now.”

“What do you want us to do?” Asper asks, tilting her chin up to meet his gaze head-on. Tron suppresses a smile. Beck sure knows how to pick them.

“For now,” the security program says, “I want you all to rest. Power down and defrag your systems. This is going to be a long campaign, and I want you all to be ready for it. This place is safe, and heavily defended, but I’ll keep an eye out to see if we were followed by any other blockade troops. Now go.”

The mechanics disperse accordingly - if nothing else, they know how to be summoned and dismissed. It‘s a fact that makes Tron  _ ache  _ in a way he can’t untangle. 

Mara and Zed remain, Beck’s forward guard staying where they can keep an eye on him.

_ Create and Transform, huh, Flynn?  _ Tron thinks.  _ Maybe this time it’ll work.  _

“You two,” Tron says in a quieter voice, and beckons them toward the healing chamber with a hand. They fall in beside him as he begins adjusting the chamber’s saturation level. It’s time to take Beck out, to see what damage has been repaired, and what’s irreversible. 

“There’s a sleep chamber through the left exit, take him there. I’ll talk to him when he reboots.”

Mara and Zed both nod at once, and when Tron deactivates the chamber, they haul Beck onto their shoulders with surprising ease. They’ve done this before, then. Pulling Beck back up is something they know how to do.

Tron powers down the chamber and crosses the atrium to the far window, the one that spills the entirety of Argon’s skyline before him. He used to watch with a deep pain in his circuits, so far removed from a place he’d once protected with the very base of his core code, unable to enter, unable to  _ help.  _ It’s time he stopped ignoring his prime directive, hiding and waiting and biding his time. CLU had come to derezz them all.

“You’ll want to make a game out of this, won’t you?” Tron asks his reflection under his breath, pale and almost ghostly superimposed over Argon’s cityscape. He can imagine CLU an entire city away, illuminated by gold, watching the same lights, the same grid.

“You always did want to play a game with me, one that ended in my deresolution. Alright, then, I’ll play, old friend. But I promise you - this time, I’ll win.”

 

x

 

Beck’s systems reboot one by one, starting with the deepest parts of his core processors and moving down the queue to his subroutines. It’s painful, each and every line of code needing a proper reset, systems that usually lie dormant being booted back up so they can be cycled correctly and then put back into standby. Beck groans, forcing his body into motion enough that he can roll over and start to prop himself up with his arms - 

His system errors ping his processor. He’s not able to do it.

Beck dismisses the error and logs it, then tries again.

With a yelp that’s all shredded nerve coding and a bright pop of pain, he falls onto his left side as his right arm overcompensates and braces for something his left arm isn’t able to do.

_ His left arm.  _

Beck checks his error log and feels a cold spike of panic crawl through his systems.

His battle routines cycle on in a quarter of a second, reacting to the damage report that appears in his processor, the lack of light in the room, the closed door.

Beck forces himself to stand. His cores lurch, the sudden motion and  _ lack of motion  _ from his left side making him stumble a bit. He crosses the small room to the door, but his pings do nothing - the door may as well be a wall for all he’s able to access it.

Beck palms the wrench sheathed to his thigh holster and opens the data compiler within, plugging it into the side of the door where he imagines an interface might go. His faceplate onlines and rezzes around him, a cocoon of anonymity he’s always found comforting. 

The door slides away, but he must’ve misjudged the size of the room, because he’s plugged his wrench right into the panel that now slides away. With the weight he’s putting on the wrench suddenly disappearing, Beck topples forward, biting down on a shout of pain as he scrambles to keep his left side clear. System errors fog his processor, blocking most of his view. 

_ “Hey!”  _

Hands find his shoulders. On instinct and without being able to see properly through the hail of warnings, Beck lashes out with his left leg, driving his momentum forward and toward his right side. His hand comes up to grab his disc, the dual white-blue lines humming a tangled, static-filled whine. 

“ _ Flynn,  _ he’s - “

“It’s  _ okay,  _ just let us -”

_ “Beck.” _

Beck jerks at the sound of his name so close to his ear, and dismisses the errors in one override wave. They’re all logged to his system and then fold closed, clearing his view.

Mara and Zed are crouched in front of him, their hands on his shoulders to keep him down and still, lights pulsing a rapid  _ comfort  _ sequence. Through their grip he can feel the sudden deluge of  _ stop  _ being transmitted through his circuits. At his right shoulder, Tron has his palm against his spine. Beck is faintly aware that the security program is pinging him over and over again, and with a steadying breath, he sends a ping of his own.

“You’re alright,” Tron says, but Beck’s not sure if it’s a statement or a question, “your ‘jet was hit by the lightcruiser we intercepted. I brought you back to base. Everyone’s here. Everyone’s fine.”

Mara smiles at him faintly - Beck can tell she’s scared even through the transmissions of  _ comfort _ she’s sending him. Zed looks like he’s seen a ghost.

Beck looks at Tron. “What happened?” he asks, and the security program’s expression breaks with the weight of the pain and confusion in his voice.

“Beck, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t able to get to you in time - we put you in the healing chamber, but without a medic there’s nothing else we can do - “   
“No,” Beck corrects, and tries to make Tron find his eyes through the layer of the faceplate, tries to make him feel the weight of his gaze even though it’s completely lost in the black-tinted visor. “I mean, what happened that you’re calling me Beck now.”

Tron sighs. He helps Beck to his feet, and gestures for Mara and Zed to give them some space. Without a word he turns toward the room Beck had just sprung himself out of. As they enter Tron activates the internal lights, and Beck can see he was half-right; the room is small, but it’s not a holding cell the way he’d initially thought, just a particularly cramped sleep chamber. It must be Tron’s, Beck realizes dully, if they’re in the atrium of the base. 

As the door closes behind them, Tron shakes his head.

“There was no way I could hide your identity after your lightjet was shot down - there was no time, and your systems were malfunctioning. Mara and Zed followed me to the healing chamber, fixed it, but they saw you.”   
“Anyone else?” Beck asks quietly. 

“No,” Tron says, “but they all know who I am. You can worry about it later, Beck - you’re still too injured to be up, let’s get you laying back down.”

Beck shakes his head. “I don’t want to go back into sleep mode. I want to know what’s going on.”

Tron runs a hand down his face, looking for all the grid like a program who needs a glass of energy and a long defrag cycle.

“There’s not much else to tell. From what I can gather we weren’t followed by any other occupation forces, so we should be safe here. For now, we’re just resting before we figure out what our next move is. Because you’re injured it’ll take more time before we can try any kind of recon or even evacuation, but - “

“Time isn’t something Argon has,” Beck protests.

“We don’t have a  _ medic,  _ Beck. The healing chamber is used to keep my wounds contained, it can’t heal damaged code completely.”

“Then put another patch on them!” Beck shouts, “override my code if you have to! Have Mara and Zed design a proxy! Don’t just take me out of this because I’m hurt!”

“ _ Beck,”  _ Tron says, putting his hands on the program’s shoulders. He doesn’t try to transmit anything, but Beck can feel the frustration growing in the security program’s circuits.

“I’m not taking you out of  _ anything.  _ I still need your help; you’re still my partner. But your systems are storing a massive amount of pain to keep you up like this, and eventually, it’s going to overwhelm your processors. Your usual way of fighting won’t work for you now. The way you interface with the data compilers, the way you carry out your core function, won’t work for you now.”   
“I don’t need two arms to be the Renegade  _ or  _ a mechanic,” Beck growls.

Tron shakes his head, “No, but your programming doesn’t know that. It’ll be harder, now. I just want you ready for that. Please, Beck, just trust me. It’s my operative to protect you.”

“Fine,” Beck sighs, feeling his shoulders hunch. His systems are  _ tired,  _ even after a full reboot. The energy drain from his wounds must be massive. “But I want to be involved in every step, even if I can’t fight yet.”

Tron nods. “In the meantime we’ll put you in the healing chamber, keep your repair systems running at maxcap. We’ll find a medic, somehow.”

_ Paige,  _ Beck thinks, but pushes the thought from his processor. Paige won’t help him - and even if by some miracle she wanted to, she’s half a city away and surrounded by her fellow soldiers. Argon’s become a fortress for the occupation, more than ever, a seat of power for the gold and orange biolights that have infiltrated it.

“Get some rest, Beck,” Tron says, insistent, “while you still can.”

As the security program leaves, Mara and Zed slip into the room around him. Beck notices the half-glances they keep giving him, the way they arc their forms around so they don’t accidentally touch him, the reverence glowing soft in their biolights.

“Hey,” Zed says when the door closes behind them. Beck tries to crack a smile, but feels it come out faint and plasticine on his face. 

“Hey.”

Mara bites her lip, and then dives into Beck. Beck’s hands come up to steady her, but she beats him to it, wrapping her arms around his middle and hiding her face in his undamaged shoulder. Beck winces, but ignores the pain. 

“Idiot,” he hears Mara mutter, “I can’t believe you didn’t tell us you’re the Renegade, that’s  _ so cool.” _

Beck laughs. After a second, Zed’s expression breaks open into a soft smile, and the program moves toward his friends to wrap them both in a hug from Beck’s other side.

“I’m sorry,” Beck says, even though he’s not, not really, “I wanted to tell you.”

“Next time you think about keeping us out of stuff for our own good,” Zed tells him, “Don’t.”

Mara suddenly slaps his good arm. “You  _ knew!  _ You knew it was me with the Jolly Tricksters, didn’t you! That’s why you told me to stay out of it.”

“The who?” Zed asks. 

Beck shakes his head, feeling a smile on his face through the dregs of system pain and the crushing weight of exhaustion.

“We’ve got a lot to catch up on.”

 

x

 

Paige gathers a lightcycle baton from the cache in the main hangar of CLU’s flagship. The space is massive, about half again as big as its counterpart on Tesler’s ship ( _ Dyson’s, now,  _ she reminds herself). Toward the far wall, in neat lines following the yellow-gold circuitry on the floor, lightjets and lightcruisers are rezzed. Lightrunners and lightcrawlers are arranged in phalanxes on the other side, and toward the back are rows and rows of tanks with their hardlight treads deactivated. All of them, all of these machines made for combat, are ready to deploy at any given second. Paige wonders at that.

_ Like soldiers.  _

She’ll have to get her disc checked out soon - these thoughts aren’t healthy, are the early signs of a failing system somewhere, possibly of a glitching core. 

“Going somewhere?” Someone asks behind her.

Paige doesn’t turn, just keeps thumbing through the cache for a lightcycle with a sturdy enough engine core - an older model that retains speed, maybe, she thinks to herself, something from the ENCOM 400’s line. Rare enough, but especially in an occupation ship.

“I’m captaining a search-and-destroy team out on the perimeter of Argon,” she says, calm. She turns her head over her shoulder to address the program behind her, “Actually, I was hoping to see you - wanted to know if you’d wanna come.”

Cutler shrugs. “Dyson hasn’t exactly given us orders not to. Hasn’t given us any orders at all, really.”   
“Yeah,” Paige says, “almost like he’s busy, what with the reformatting of an entire city he’s directing.”

She bites her lip and selects a lightcycle from the end of the line - a 500, but it’ll do the job. She takes the one next to it, too. 

Cutler sighs. “Look,” he says, and Paige can feel  _ frustrated  _ pulse from him even at this distance, “we can keep circling each other forever, Paige, but I don’t think either of us has the time or energy for that. You want help with your search-and-destroy, fine. But I think you need to start looking at the bigger picture.”   
“What bigger picture? How Argon’s going to become a new Capitol with all of its citizens still inside? Or how about the fact that the Renegade now has a small  _ army  _ of mechanics somewhere in said city? Or maybe, how Tesler’s been  _ derezzed,  _ which means that any of us could be next? Any of those pictures big enough for you?”

Cutler keeps his gaze steady and his expression blank, but his biolights are too bright to make Paige believe he’s not scared to the core of his coding. She is, too. 

“I’m a soldier without standing orders,” she says, quietly, “so I’ll do whatever I can think of that comes next. I’ll keep moving. It’s all I can do.”

She turns fully and offers the second lightcycle baton to Cutler, her hand on one end. 

“I mean it,” Cutler says over his crossed arms, but slowly he unfolds them and reaches out to take the other end of the lightcycle. They stay suspended like that for a moment, not touching but linked through the baton. “We can circle each other forever, not trusting the other, expecting the worst out of each other.. But thinking like that makes me tired, Paige, and I think it’s the same for you, too. I can give you my word - as long as we’re under Dyson’s command together, you can trust me. I’m no Pavel.”

“I believe you,” Paige says, “but trust isn’t something I can just give away. You’ve gotta earn that.”

Cutler tugs on the baton and it slips from her fingers. They stand apart again, the same steady biolights running a bit too bright, the same soldier’s posture keeping their backs straight and their eyes forward.

_ He’s no Pavel,  _ Paige thinks, but she’s not sure whether she believes it, or if she’s trying to convince herself of it.

“Deal,” Cutler says.

They activate their batons in unison, and the lightcycles roar out of the main hangar threading twin trails of orange-red light through the city. 

 

x

 

_ A digital frontier,  _ Flynn had called the grid. Tron looks over it now from within the atrium. Around him, mechanics are milling, checking in on each other, tuning lightcycles and lightcrawlers they had grabbed from Able’s garage before it was destroyed. Behind him, Beck stands in the healing chamber, doused in an energy mist. In front of him lays Argon.

_ A digital utopia,  _ CLU had called the grid. Tron wonders at that. 

And then the security program blinks. 

Far, towards the furthest edge of Argon where it meets the Sea, a pillar of golden light appears. It would be beautiful, if it weren’t instantly recognizable. As Tron watches through widening eye renders, the pillar expands horizontally, creating a solid, scalding wall of yellow. It follows what Tron knows to be the perfect lines of the harbor, expanding quickly and without hesitation.

“Mara, Zed,” Tron calls, never turning away. The two mechanics look up at him from the lightcycle they’re tuning, see the reflected golden light rising on the horizon, and as Mara moves forward to stand next to Tron, Zed moves backward to rouse Beck from the chamber.

The wall of light, at least fifteen thousand dpi high, moves inward toward the city, tracing its edges, enveloping at least a quarter of it before the hardlight meets itself and seals off, a steady band of gold that forms a loose rectangle.

“What is that?” Mara asks.

“It’s surrounding Sector One,” Tron murmurs, and then, as the recognition hits deep within his core, “it’s a firewall.”

Mara looks over at him with a plain confusion, not understanding, because of course she wouldn’t - she wasn’t compiled before the Purge, before the firewall that had been raised around the Capitol, before the boiling light that had destroyed the city and left it pristine at the same time. She hadn’t seen the chaos-made order, the destruction that left perfection.

Beck and Zed join the two at the viewport - the other mechanics have noticed, too, the harsh yellow light a curtain that falls over the atrium. None of them will know what this is, what this means. But Tron does.

Tron’s taken too long - his turn has been taken for him.

“CLU’s reformatting Argon,” he says.

x

 

_ end part two _


End file.
